Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @05:17PM
from the i-don't-like-the-last-thing-you-did-so-i-don't-like-you dept.

sciencehabit writes "'Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?' Ronald Reagan's famous question in the U.S. presidential election of 1980 is generally a good yardstick for picking a candidate, or at least for judging a leader's economic policies. But few voters follow it. Instead, they are swayed by economic swings in the months leading up to the election, often ignoring the larger trends. Why are we so shortsighted? A psychological study of voting behavior suggests an answer and points to a simple fix. ... Healy and Lenz challenged their subjects to evaluate hypothetical governments based on slightly varying information. For example, some received information expressed as yearly income while others received the same information expressed as a yearly growth rate. The same information in a plot of steadily increasing average personal income over 3 years—$32,400, $33,100, $33,800—can also be expressed as a steadily decreasing rate of growth—3%, 2.3%, 2.1%. That did the trick. Just changing the units of the data was enough to cure voter fickleness. When economic trends were expressed as yearly income rather than rates of change, the subjects made accurate judgments. But if the same information was expressed as a change over time—the bias reappeared."

Voters, we find, actually intend to judge presidents on cumulative growth. However, since that characteristic is not readily available to them, voters inadvertently substitute election-year performance

blame the candidates and the news media...both are obviously not doing their jobs.

candidates, because...holy crap they're supposed to be *running* for office. they can't blame others for everything...they are responsible for how they present their case.

news media...obviously idiots. If you want to call people stupid, call ***NEWS PRODUCERS*** stupid fucking idiots. You can thrown in the TV company executives in there too. They have *no idea* what they are doing in regards to the 4th Estate & informing the populace.

I have to fault SoulSkill & all nerds here as well. Its a cop out to say "all people are idiots" as a solution or explanation to every problem. It's reductive and unworthy of our industry. Blaming the user by default *hurts our industry* because it alienates us from the users, and from our own work.

Systems need correction. Blaming the people the system is designed to serve when a feedback loop occurs is illogical!

"Don't blame people for their own shortsightedness and stupidity? I think I'll do just that."

Well, wait, though. If you are going to do that, at least blame them for the correct stupidity, rather than the wrong one.

It's difficult for many people to "do their own research" if the news is blathering untruths and misleadings all the time. People don't expect the news to lie... and it does, often enough that we should be concerned as a country.

So yes, people SHOULD do their own research. But 2 things are required before they will do that: (1) they must first be aware that what they were told (or misled to believe) is wrong, and (2) the correct information must be available.

Where should they get information? If you ask me, no one source is trustworthy; pretty much all of them will lie or tell half truths. I think it is therefore best to get your information from a combination of many sources and try to discern the truth on your own.

There are also websites dedicated to telling the public about politicians' voting records, among other things. Very useful, and certainly more so than listening to or watching any campaign promises or speeches.

Since it is virtually impossible to get unbiased news, do what I do: Listen to both sides. For example, concerning the Ukrainian protests, it's usually quite healthy to take a western news source and then compare it to reports from a Russian source. It's amazing how different the stories are.

In the end, in today's news, you're a bit like a judge sitting in a trial. You know that both sides somehow lie to you and it's your job to find out what really happened. Kinda sad that you're now supposed to do the job the reporter was originally tasked with.

Just like a judge can't make a fair (as in: impartial but right) judgement by simply meeting the two parties in middle ground (else I'll sue my neighbor for all he got and get half of his junk, a pretty sweet deal if I have no case at all), you can't simply mesh everything together and assume that the truth is by definition where the lies "cancel each other out".

But it gives you two point of view and then you, as an intelligent being with a halfway decent education (yes, I know, I expect a lot, but then again, I think someone who at least goes to the length of finding two conflicting sources has that intelligence in the first place or he would have been happy with a single source telling him "the truth") have to weigh them. You have to judge whose "story" is more credible, who you think tells you more of the truth, or maybe even all of it. Personally, I think the cases where one side told the unblemished truth and the other side nothing but propaganda lies are rather few.

But you're right, you can't simply dump them together and extract "the truth" out of it. You can only hope to learn it by doing the judging yourself, that's not an automated process. And yes, it will be biased.

Erh... just noticed that got out a bit too strong. The problem I have with English is that there is no impersonal pronoun like "man" in German or "on" in French. Please read the "you" as an impersonal "you", not directed at you but used in the general, impersonal sense.

Don't blame people for their own shortsightedness and stupidity? I think I'll do just that. They should be doing their own research to begin with.

You should be doing your on research as well. Looking things up online doesn't count. You're just reading someone else's research, or a reductive article based on yet another person's research. Until you're going out there and counting the pennies yourself, you're not really baking your own apple pie from scratch.

99.9999% of people have no choice but to be shortsighted and stupid when all the information presented to them is shortsighted, and stupid (spun, manipulated, or outright wrong). Saying they s

There is no source of information that the average person can access that doesn't already blend information with opinion.

There is no source of information that wouldn't be biased, since information is interpreted data and the process of interpretation is dependent on the interpreter and their model of the world. The best you can hope for is that the interpreter shares the model with the eventual recipient, so the message is intelligible.

The concepts relating to and methdods to deal with information are mud

It is rational to put no effort in voting decisions on a national level because the effort and time required to be informed is much larger than the realized value of your vote. You are one of millions in all but some house races, and then there is that whole electoral college diminishing the value of your vote further.

What happened yesterday in House or Senate? How did it go? Open a newspaper, turn on the evening news, or cast your eyes on a cable news network, and its a rare day that they report on what

The American population is essentially either taking welfare or working for the Gubment.

That's the Fox News view of the world, sure. In actual reality, American workers are more productive, yet thanks to conservative economic policies have been losing income (measured in constant dollars) since the Reagan era. The number of people employed by the federal government is lower [opm.gov] than it was in the 60s, 70s, or 80s. The number state or local government employees per capita grew a little from 1980 to 2008 [cbpp.org], almost entirely because of more teachers being hired, but declined from 2008 to 2011.

So, in reality, Americans are working more productively, getting paid less, and fewer of them are working for the government.

But keep the American voter ignorant and angry, and they'll re-elect you, even as you fsck them over.

The data they provided is not enough to decide most advantageous. For that, you need TWO numbers in the graph- average cost of living and average wages. Either one alone isn't enough- both political parties know that, so both political parties concentrate on only one number.

Rate of growth kind of tries to measure average cost of living, but the relationship to wages and actual cost of living is too complex for the average voter.

Why would we want them to get lasting things done? About the only thing that makes those that want to govern tolerable is that they are generally too stupid to get anything done. Nobody who wants to govern should ever be intrusted with any real power. The more they argue about worthless things they less they are able to hurt us.

It's amazing how many things we still have and depend upon from FDR's administration. I drive over some of the bridges built then on a regular basis. Parks, too, would be largely left barren if the next president was other than FDR and came in, scouring the legacy.

But these battles in the past couple decades are absurd - build some legislation, tear it out, build some legislation, gut it. Geez. How about both sides working to the betterment rather than this sort of garbage.

Any economist making a chart like that would factor in inflation, which is basically the same thing as you're talking about. But the bigger problem is: "average earnings" is a meaningless number, since you're not dealing with a homogenous group. If Bill Gates gets a 50% pay raise, and 100 janitors get a 50% pay cut, then the average national income will rise. Understanding these things takes only basic math skills, but a lot of voters lack these skills, and the journalists can't be bothered to explain.

Pretty much sums up my voting. I look for whomever I figure is most qualified - this doesn't mean is qualified, but that hedges toward someone who might actually have some idea what the F they are doing, rather than being an utter tool and electing candidates based upon Hot Button (sucker) issues, like guns, abortion, creeping socialism, etc.

You have choices, and some of them are third parties. You (and people like you) just choose to make your own prophecies become a reality. Even if they don't win, it's better than voting for evil, and it can send a message to the main parties.

Thanks for voting for the candidates that continue to infringe upon our rights, though. I'm sure things will change for the better.

You have choices, and some of them are third parties. You (and people like you) just choose to make your own prophecies become a reality

We have had presidents from only two parties for more than 150 years. One thing they have done an exquisite job of over those years is preventing anyone from any other party from being able to make a credible run at the white house.

However, even more significant is the fact that both parties have tacked hard to the right over the past several decades. Our current president comes from what is allegedly the "liberal" party yet he is further to the right than any president before him. Meanwhile the republicans are out in outer effin' space with their hard-right ideology. While this should make an opportunity for someone from the center or (gasp!) the left to rise to power, it really just leaves the lower economic classes with a choice of how badly they want to be screwed.

For me, the choice is pretty easy. The republicans want me to lose my job and then work at something else for pennies a day while they get rich. The democrats at best will allow me to continue in my chosen line of work, with no real hope for a meaningful chance at career advancement. A vote for a third party is a vote taken away from the democrats, which only improves my chance of ending up unemployed.

Don't get me wrong. I don't like what the democratic party has become. I just prefer it over the punishment the republicans have in mind for me.

Really? What lesson do they learn when they lose votes but retain power?

They're still fighting with the other party, and both 'sides' have third parties that align with their ideologies. Figure it out yourself. In the past, it did make an impact, and certainly more so than continuing to vote for evil every single time.

That is a rather immature (and pitifully black-and-white) description then you describe someone else as

It's not immature; it's simply the truth. You're either evil yourself, or stupid.

Someone else is not automatically evil just because you disagree with something they do.

But they are evil/stupid when they're voting for people who give us things like unfettered border searches, the TSA, the NSA, stop-and-frisk, constitution-free zones, the Iraq war, t

Because we all know how much conservatives love gay people and universal healthcare.

I don't know what kind of alternate reality you live in, but here on planet earth the affordable care act that passed in 2010 is not even remotely close to universal healthcare. All it did was make every person in this country into an obligate consumer for the health insurance industry, which still holds most of the power. It was the largest handout to big business in the history of the world.

As for gay people, what has Obama actually done for gay people? Saying his own views on gay marriage have "e

Our current president is the most conservative president our country has ever had

Okay, I'm about as liberal as it gets, and I have to say this is a ridiculous statement. He's not even more conservative than his predecessor, to say nothing of serious conservatives like the unholy trinity of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan.

He hasn't enacted a single "liberal" action or policy that didn't have corporate backing.

..because "corporate backing" rules out "liberal," right?

Oh, no it doesn't. You have conflated your hate of corporations with your hate of conservatives. Consider that whole ACA thing. While we call it "Obamacare" it was spearheaded by Pelosi and Reid, not Obama. So now you are basically claiming that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the entire Democrat majorities of both House and Senate when the ACA was passed were "top 5 conservative."

Clearly you have dived into the depths of complete partisan ridiculousnes

From the outside looking in the ACA looks pretty conservative. Forcing people to deal with corporations is the opposite of socialism and it is so funny to hear American conservatives going on about how it is socialist.Its got the usual right wing authoritarian thing going of forcing you to give your money to big business. The left wing authoritarian thing would have been the government running it.Remember that the it started out by being proposed by a right wing think tank and championed by Romney who is even more right wing then Obama.Of course ideally would be non-authoritarian healthcare where right wing would be lots of competing small businesses and the left wing being lots of competing co-ops or at least local government.

I'm not a conservative so I don't speak for them, but I don't think conservatives are in favor of government sponsored monopolies or oligopolies, which is what this is. They sure made a lot of noise about how much they didn't want the ACA, that much is without a doubt.

As a libertarian, I believe pretty firmly that government sponsored monopolies are inherently bad, and I'm pretty sure that conservatives share the same view.

I can observe that, for example, Hollywood completely owns the democratic party. This

Indeed, that shows the reality of the modern Western democracy - voters do not get to choose who they would want. They get to choose from pool of candidates which often contains no truly desirable candidates for voters, but since voters know that one of these candidates will get the job regardless, they vote for one they see as least harmful to themselves.

Not all Western countries are there yet, but most are following US into that political hell hole as US is still widely seen as the leader of democratic mo

But that's exactly what this sort of thing shows is not the case! The data about cognitive biases is robust. This one is a variation of the framing effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) [wikipedia.org] and the data shows that even smart people as individuals don't do well on such tests. We are all as individuals subject to cognitive biases. What's even worse is that knowing about cognitive biases can even be counterproductive http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ [lesswrong.com] because we are much more prone to see them in other people than in ourselves even though we're all subject to them.

You're presuming that people usually vote and/or act as individuals. I would argue that they do not. There's clearly a herd mentality, especially when it comes to voting. Why else would so many people develop an 'us versus them' attitude instead of 'me versus them.'

Smart successful people tend to have fewer children, and children tend to be born when the parent is older. Children from older parents have a greater chance of DNA mutation/errors, which then enter into the population.

The downside of this, is if people didn't have the vote then very, very evil people would take control.

So think of it this way, we get some dumb leaders; we get some idiotic leaders; we get some bad legislation and we get some self defeating legislation, BUT we can turn around and push it out and replace it with something else.

Under an evil dictator we're stuck until the dictator dooms us with one of the classic blunders -- getting involved in a land war in Asia.

if people didn't have the vote then very, very evil people would take control

People have the vote in most places, and very, very evil people have taken control widely anyway.

Before the objection, let me add this. I take this to mean, not that the vote does not matter, but that the vote alone is not enough. A good constitution (e.g., US) is a safeguard, but only if it is observed. The evil people who have seized control are in open defiance of the constitution (they are nothing if not reasonably clever in te

Unfortunately, it is usually the "voter" who is repealed by a bullet and not the dictator. Many more "voters" were repealed under Saddam Hussein than Saddams were repealed by bullets.

On the topic of this story, though, "are you better off than four years ago" is not the correct question to ask. As many people here tend to point out, well into Barack Obama's first term the performance of the economy etc. was "the fault" of Mr. Bush. Some even claim that it is still his fault today. Just as the first year o

easy to say, hard to do when you know that there lackeys will respond by killing your kids and family. Possible your entire group.'Yeah, I got's gun. I fix everything' sure looks good on paper, rarely works.I blame action movies for this stupid silver bullet mentality...also werewolves.

Most voters stick with long-standing ideals that they think will work long-term -- most people will poll to the same party over and over. Only a small percentage of people that are willing to break with their party could be influenced this way (unless their party was doing something particularly silly near a vote). Swing voters matter, of course, but this article generalizes something that is not generally true.

For the impatients (or less inclined to ponder the nuances) here's my point: it is not entirely the fault of the voting constituients, "absolute-or-rate comparions" won't matter too much if all that's on the different plates to choose from is the same shit in other presentation

The voters make decisions based on the information they are fed. Not the information they *GATHER* by and large, because that is an active process. Most people seem to tune in to the media outlets that favor their political leanings, which are driven by the corporate and special interests that own these media empires. Whether your corporation is Fox, MSNBC, or American Public Media, people are really being spoon-fed an official line that serves somebody else's self-interest, packaged in a way that makes them feel like this media empire puts its own self-interest below that of its audience.

Part of the problem is that news is a form of entertainment, and in the USA at least, news outlets are legally allowed to deliberately lie to you. Journalists are hypnotists, plain and simple, and if they do tell the truth it is because it happens to align with their employers' interests that day.

If people were given the tools to understand this game during their formative years, they might be more willing to take the time to independently research the issues they care about, but even this is a stretch. After a long day at the office, most folks want to just sort of zonk out and, tired and often filled with alcohol, the news is turned on and they absorb the day's "news" without a single functioning critical thought neuron in action.

If I were naive I would suggest some legislative fix to this but knowing how the legislative process works, and its typical results, this would almost inevitably lead to a much worse scenario than that which is being played out right now.

A good portion of the voting populace "informs" themselves by switching channels and soaking up whatever the media is feeding them. It's very easy to become blindsided from the real issues by network ratings, paid-for advertising and just plain old lies.

You have to do some footwork to educate yourself because the elections always come down to one thing: Which end of the sh#t sandwich do you want to take a bite from? There has never a "perfect" choice. People are lazy, don't want to do the work and rely on n

The fact that a large majority of voters make judgments on what happens in the immediate past (i.e. 3-4 months) prior to an election, rather than the entire term of office (2, 4, or 6 years for various US Congress/Presidents) is well documented, so no surprise here.

Much of that has to do with the difficulty virtually all people have distilling a complex, hugely multivariant problem, into easily understood metrics and views. That's not going to change, because even a super genius is going to only be able to accurately remember a half-dozen major points, while there may be as many as several DOZEN relevant metrics/issues that you probably can consider important.

The proposed solution in the paper is yet another form of a simplification and lie, NOT a real solution. The simple answer is that I see no indication that the claimed "yearly growth" rate is any more accurate than the absolute income. Do the grow rates take into account inflation? (I see no indication they do) What about changes in the job market over those years? What about overall economic indicators? I.e. if the average income managed to grow ANY over the period 2007-2009 (in the middle of the most severe recession in 80 years), then that a huge accomplishment vs say merely keeping up with inflation in 2003. The authors are merely substituting one questionably useful statistic with another (of the same dubious relevance).

Never trust someone selling you a simple numerical answer to a complex problem. Politicians and Statisticians are both extremely adept at contriving lots of meaning from simple numbers. There's a reason this post is titled the way it is.

I always thought the question "'Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" was flawed. In my case the answer is Yes, I am better off than I was four years ago but it has nothing to do with the current president. In my case it was a lot of hard work, an advanced degree (which I paid for myself), and a lovely new wife that got me ahead over the last four years. We could have elected Donald Trump, Don King, or Kang and Kodos and I would more than likely be in the exact same position I am now.

I always thought the question "'Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" was flawed. In my case the answer is Yes, I am better off than I was four years ago but it has nothing to do with the current president. In my case it was a lot of hard work, an advanced degree (which I paid for myself), and a lovely new wife that got me ahead over the last four years. We could have elected Donald Trump, Don King, or Kang and Kodos and I would more than likely be in the exact same position I am now.

Statistically speaking that doesn't matter, because there are outliers both ways who are listening.

The problem is that if Reagan had been fair he would have said "Many of you are better off now than when I entered office mainly because that was early in this boom cycle, a cycle that I have little to no control over."

You targeted the unnecessary use of one of the two adjectives. I would have asked what he did with the ugly one.

Naaaah... as I'm well aware by direct experience: beauty it's at best a metastable state. Given enough impulses and pumping... and the system looses all the excitation and falls onto the ground state (ugly, that is). Empirically, seems like a rule that applies no matter the sex, religion, race, etc.

Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago is a horrible metric to judge politicians. Policies take a while to implement so a really bad first year that you've inherited could overwhelm the next 33.5 months. The economic cycle can overpower policies anyway. And there are other issues besides personal well-being which seems to over-focus on economic issues. 4 years is both too arbitrary a time frame and too short of a time frame.

It is a fair point. Perhaps a better question is, "do you expect to be better off if the policies favored by this shithead are implemented? - compared to those of the preceding guy, or the new prospect's opponents".

I used to vote based on the height of the candidate's hair, but now it's all about whether or not I would like to have a beer with the candidate.

For example, I wanted to have a beer with Mitt Romney's hair. Man has some beautiful hair. The kind of hair that you can believe in. Nice and straight. Not kinky or well, you know.... Mitt had American hair. Hair that knows how to sing "America the Beautiful" in the language that was born in America...English.

Ironically, income for most Americans has not increased since Reagan became President.

It is surprising that cutting taxes and reducing regulations for corporations and the wealthy, while undermining unions and cutting government services to everyone else, results in the wealthy getting wealthier and the rest standing still. Who could have imagined such an outcome?

When will the " trickle down [wikipedia.org]" that Reagan promised start happening? I feel like it could be any day now.

I'll leave it to economists to debate whether or not "Reaganomics" had an effect one way or another on incomes, but your analysis seems shallow to me. First of all, it neglects the decade of horrendous economics that preceded him. Second, Reagan only served for 8 years. I've never seen any kind of chart showing a correlation between Reagan's policies and wage stagnation - I suspect he simply happened to be President while larger forces were at work.

LynnwoodRooster seems to have been betting that by stating a lie while providing a couple of links (that refute the lie) most people will assume that that the links actually support it.

If you follow the GINI link you will find that the both the pre-tax and after-tax GINI DID NOT INCREASE AT ALL [wikipedia.org] during the Clinton years! The rise under Reagan went flat, then resumed its rise again under Bush.

Also actually look at that median HOUSEHOLD (not individual) curve LR links to. By the end of the Reagan-Bush era it was down to $48K (from 45.5K at the start), a far less impressive 5.5% over 12 years, and the whole reason for the rise was due to the second adult in the household going to work [taxfoundation.org] - since actual wages were flat. [wikimedia.org]

Taxes are not near all-time lows; please look at the per-capita Federal taxes, adjusted for inflation - you'll find today's collections are nearly twice that of 1950s and 1960s. Twice wouldn't be close to all-time lows.

As far as productivity, you are correct - it skyrocketed in the later 1980s and 1990s - precisely the time the GINI index started taking off. Why? Because it comes from a fundamental shift in what our economy does - it moved from manufacturing to information. Old money is slowly whittling

For example, some received information expressed as yearly income while others received the same information expressed as a yearly growth rate. The same information in a plot of steadily increasing average personal income over 3 years—$32,400, $33,100, $33,800—can also be expressed as a steadily decreasing rate of growth—3%, 2.3%, 2.1%. That did the trick. Just changing the units of the data was enough to cure voter fickleness. When economic trends were expressed as yearly income rather than rates of change, the subjects made accurate judgments. But if the same information was expressed as a change over time—the bias reappeared.

I'm not sure why they say that it "cured" voter fickleness. First of all, it seems to me that in both cases, voters are going along with the picture being painted by the statistics provided. You say, "income continues to rise," and it sounds good. You say, "income growth is slowing," and it sounds bad. The person responding to these statements isn't showing better judgement when they hear one statistic vs another. In both cases, they're dealing with the information uncritically. Outside of any context

Neither politicians nor big media will do anything to solve it, they need that people keeps being dumb and manipulable, so they keep voting/buying/not complaining/etc, even if the country have no future that way. Is up to the people to try to educate themselves and others to know, recognize and try to avoid their own cognitive biases [wikipedia.org], because those are exploited every day.

Let me play devil's advocate here. While we can ascribe that to "dumb voter shortsightedness", wouldn't it also be true to say that if you can ascribe economic performance to a president at all, their effect on things would be much more heavily weighted towards the recent past anyway?

Early term performance would likely be out of their hands, and my assumption would be that they want to get reelected and would try hard to eke out some benefit before election season. If you can't bring out the big performance

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

The world is complex and ever changing, nobody can with any real confidence say what four years with the "other guy" would have been like even in retrospect. Across electrions it's almost hopeless, each president starts under completely different circumstances and the global economy, technology and science, it all changes rapidly.

It's mostly a belief in whether this administration did better or worse than the alternative(s?) and more often than not on ideology about what the "right thing" is. Could the financial recession been handled better? Would it been handled worse? Could it have been avoided in the first place? Those who lean towards left say there should have been more regulation because it's a failure of the free market. Those who lean right say the regulation and bailouts was the problem because they didn't let the free market work. Nobody can prove the other side wrong, it'd be so much easier if we ever got the true answers.

For example, it's easy to have money "right now" even for a country, just go deeper in debt. Taxes stay low, services stay high, none of those unpopular tax hikes or cutbacks. Until shit hits the fan to smaller or greater degrees, at least. All this really tells you is that you better have bread and circus the last months leading up to an election, somehow that wisdom seems ancient. You dump shit on future generations and future politicians that start with a shit economy, but as long as you can keep shoveling it in front of you it's better than dealing with it.

The question asked by Reagan represents a dangerously short-sighted mindset. For example, it is possible to temporarily boost economic activity by lowering taxes and interest rates and/or increasing spending, but this is not without its dangers. For example, much of the apparent prosperity of the Bush Jr. years was a result of a completely unsustainable real estate bubble. If you follow this through to its logical conclusion, you can see why budget deficits have been the rule with the economy lurching from

when all you're given is a choice between Obama and Romney, what difference would it make?

That is a perverse and nonsensical suggestive [wikipedia.org] / rhetorical [wikipedia.org] question. From what anyone who was paying the slightest attention in 2008 knew, one was a statist extremist with zero management experience or talent and zero willingness to work with people having diverse political views, and the other an at least half hearted libertarian-conservative with well demonstrated management experience and talent, and demonstrated wi

We all know the Black population for example voted for Obama whole heartedly simply because he was Black. I really have no issue with that its understandable. Even today 85% of Blacks polled still support Obama which makes my point that even though Black unemployment is higher now then when Obama took office, and more Black are on welfare just proves a point that its not really about performance.

The traditional cynical way of finishing the thought is that it's not about performance, it's about feelings. It